The Republia Times

Republia's rival nation Antegria has been defeated at war and rebel elements have been quashed! Now the centralised government needs to win over the hearts and minds of its citizens -- with the player on the front lines, comrade, as the editor of the national newspaper! Sitting at a news desk (bearing an uncanny ressemblance to an '80s Macintosh desktop publishing setup), players oversee stories coming in over the news wire services and get to select which stories to run and how much space to allocate them on the front page before the work day ends and the papers go to the presses. Some sensational stories (about, eg., celebrities, weather and sports) increase readership interest, while other stories -- about policy triumphs and the like -- increase loyalty to the government. Bad news, however, lowers government loyalty.

Over the first few days of your stewardship of the paper, the player's bosses in the government will assign loyalty goals and readership quotas that need to be met at risk of the comfort and safety of the player's family, under government supervision. Later, a garbled news channel suggests that the pendulum may be swinging back the other way and it might be in the player's best interests to run stories critical of the old bosses in preparation for the arrival of the new bosses.